The Greek Islands Read Online Free Page A

history anywhere else.
    It is important not to care too much.
    One of the magical things in The Tempest is the way the atmosphere of the island is experienced and conveyed by ship-wrecked souls when they come ashore. The sleep – the enormous spell of sleep which the land casts upon them. They become dreamers, and somnambulists, a prey to visions and to loves quite outside the ordinary boundaries of their narrow Milanese lives. This sedative quality, its bewitched disengagement from all concern, is something you will not be long in feeling here. The air around you becomes slowly more and more anaesthetic, more blissful, more impregnated with holy sleep. You will realize that this is exactly what happened to the conquerors who landed here – they fell asleep. The French started to build the Rue de Rivoli but fell asleep before it was finished. The British, who had almost a hundred-year lease on the place, decided that it needed a seat of Government and built a most elegant one with imported Malta stone, as well as a Chapter for the Ionian Parliament which they planned to create (for once, memorable and apposite architecture – is there any other British colony with buildings as fine?). But they fell asleep and the island slipped from their nerveless fingers into the freedom it had always desired. Freedom to dream.
    Everything absurd, everything tragic, and everything gay seems to have happened here. The place has been a dowry forkings and queens. Richard Coeur de Lion passed this way. Napoleon planned to run a frigate aground on the fort and attack from the rigging. (Lucky he didn’t – the plan is madly impractical.) Byron, Trelawny, and the Greek Liberation Committee brought their squabbles here and were met by arch-eccentrics like Lord North, dressed in a chlamys and crowned with laurel. Solomos (the first great poet of free Greece), the author of the national anthem, was received with acclaim by the British when they ruled Corfu in their graceless and rather bluff fashion. (They made up for their manners by ennobling everyone and marrying the prettiest and most talented girls.)
    When the French, in their spiteful fashion, burned the Venetian Golden Book in which the names of the great Venetian families were inscribed, the aristocracy did not die – as it was intended to; it was in fact reborn phoenix-like in titles stiff and unreal as old brocade. They live on, these beautiful titles, even today.
    Of the troubles and exactions of Venetian rule we know little, but the island as a whole prospered under Venice. Why? The Venetians gave ten gold pieces for every grove of a hundred olive trees planted. When they in their turn fell asleep and left, Corfu possessed nearly three million trees. They are still her pride and her dowry. Not to mention the income derived from an oil as famous now as that of Delphi. It is indeed due to the Venetians that Corfu strikes the casual visitor as being one vast olive forest – it is. Edward Lear, who spent some years in the island – and wrote some of his funniest letters from here – was quite haunted by the olive groves, as witness his marvellously buoyant engravings of the various sites. When the north wind comes drumming down, this whole Prosperine extent of trees shivers and turns silver. In contrast to most other olives these have never been pruned, and they climb to unusual heights. Some are said to be six hundred years old. The Venetians were along time here (1386 to 1797) so there was plenty of time to carry out an extensive re-afforestation. The peasantry not only got a bounty for planting but could pay their taxes in oil. In the late 1960s a census of the trees was taken which showed that Corfu alone had 3,100,000 trees.
    The ideal subtropical climate is another factor which favours the olive; its rather delicate flowering is seldom disturbed in spring. Despite the abundant winter rainfall, the highest in Greece (1300 mm) a year, there is comparatively little or no snowfall.